


the reason that i do not fall

by aduviri



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-01
Updated: 2012-01-01
Packaged: 2017-10-28 17:03:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/310073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aduviri/pseuds/aduviri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for a prompt on the First Class kink meme: post-movie, Erik listens to Charles fall apart until he hears something that makes him take action to save him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the reason that i do not fall

_you being in love_

 _will tell who softly asks in love,_

 _am i separated from your body smile brain hands merely_

 _to become the jumping puppets of a dream?   oh i mean:_

 _entirely having in my careful how_

 _careful arms created this at length_

 _inexcusable, this inexplicable pleasure-you go from several_

 _persons: believe me that strangers arrive_

 _when i have kissed you into a memory_

 _slowly, oh seriously_

 _-that since and if you disappear_

 _solemnly_

 _myselves_

 _ask "life, the question how do i drink dream smile_

 _and how do i prefer this face to another and_

 _why do i weep eat sleep-what does the whole intend"_

 _they wonder. oh and they cry "to be, being, that i am alive_

 _this absurd fraction in its lowest terms_

 _with everything cancelled_

 _but shadows_

 _-what does it all come down to?    love?     Love_

 _if you like and i like,for the reason that i_

 _hate people and lean out of this window is love,love_

 _and the reason that i laugh and breathe is oh love and the reason_

 _that i do not fall into this street is love.”_

 _ee cummings_

 

\--

The first time, it is so startling that he drops the security guards he had been immobilizing. By the time he recovers, they are shooting. He deflects their own bullets into their skulls, too preoccupied with the voice in his head to think.

 _Be safe, Erik. Be safe._

It is Charles’ voice, and there is no possible way he can read Erik through the helmet, he cannot overcome—

 _I don’t know where you are, exactly. You’re a void, a blank space in a million miles of jumbled thoughts and dreams. I know that wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, you can’t hear me and I can’t find you with my powers, so all I can do is offer up my thoughts—prayers?—and, oh, Erik…_

 _Be safe_.

\--

They fly from place to place like fugitives. They live in warehouses, cheap motels, and he flashes back to life before Charles found him. He finds himself reaching to play with the fateful silver coin, and smiles humorlessly to himself when he recalls what happened to it.

He hears stray thoughts from Charles, more at night; he comes to realize that this has become something like a ritual for both of them. Charles sends him thoughts he thinks Erik cannot hear, and Erik listens to the thoughts and dreams of the man he cannot have. He allows Charles to vent to him, to fill his mind with all of the things he thinks of, imagines, fears.

 _There are more by the day,_ he hears one night. _They fly to me like winged creatures to a shining light, and I cannot tell whether I am a lighthouse and they are birds (circling around me and gaining light and some shelter) or if I am instead an open flame, to burn their wings as they come near._

Charles was always given to metaphor.

 _I don’t know what to do,_ he pleads, the words echoing in the corners of Erik’s mind. _Whenever news of the riots appears on television, or mutant attacks spring up in the next town, or another law is passed that restricts our freedom, they turn to me._

 _They trust_ _me, and I have half a mind to tell them how misplaced that is. I want to tell them to follow Hank, or Alex, or Sean, or anyone but me, because their eyes press down on me begging me to tell them that it will be all right, and I cannot stand the pressure._

 _But there is really no one else to turn to, is there? You were always the only one, my friend. Hank still avoids mirror like the plague, and Alex still struggles to control himself, and Sean—well, I would know him better if he would remain on the ground for longer than five minutes. When you pushed him, you unleashed a monster of sorts, you know._

A fond sense creeps over the words like an early-morning fog, rolling and encompassing. Erik feels it tingeing his thoughts and can’t bring himself to break away from the feeling. If he closes his eyes, it feels like it did before the beach. It is a concession he can allow himself in a moment of weakness.

 _I’m so afraid, Erik_ , Charles confesses, and Erik sees him in his mind’s eye, fingers steepled and elbows resting on the oak edge of a chess board, idly rolling a pawn on the pads of his fingers. He can see the sharp creases of Charles’ collar of his white shirt, covered by a rumpled vest that rightly belongs on a much older and less attractive man. The smell of bourbon and thick carpets and a low-burning fire whisper through the back of his mind, and when he draws in a breath through his nose the plastic-and-antiseptic smell of the hotel room is an unwelcome, jarring reminder of what is real.

Charles’ thoughts are becoming more jumbled. Erik sees images, melting together with soft murmured thoughts—a young girl with dark red hair and vulnerable eyes, _Jean, sweet, teach_ , another with dark skin and a shock of white hair, _Ororo, nurture, help,_ a boy with sunglasses and hair that needs a trim, Alex’s arm slung over his shoulder, _Scott, young, family_ —all beneath a gauzy layer of a fear without real words, the overwhelming sense of failure. He can feel Charles’ need to protect these children, his fear that he will fail to do so, that he is leading them into harm.

Without thinking, he fills his own mind with soothing thoughts. _Charles, Charles, you are capable. They are safe with you. You can teach them so much_. He sends wave after wave of warmth, until he realizes that all they can do is rattle around inside his metal cage. He is no longer able to comfort his one and only friend. He listens to Charles sleep, echoes of dreams lapping against his mind, and watches the sky until the eastern edge is suffused with the softest of glows.

He turns his face to the wall and wills the words away.

\--

As he sleeps, he becomes aware of a hum in the back of his skull, low-key and perfect, _be safe be safe be safe be safe please be safe_.

\--

They settle into a routine, find a home (Emma comes from a wealthy family, and has no compunction about breaking into an unused family summer home in Virginia), begin to work. Mystique goes undercover, slipping from one role into another like a snake shedding its skin. Azazel travels to the homes of the mutants Mystique roots out, Emma often accompanying. Riptide buries himself in security plans for the house. As for Erik, he rarely leaves the place. He retreats to the sanctuary of a dusty study on the third floor, out of use and out of the way.

He and Mystique share a bed, more often out of a need for company than any real affection or as an overture for any sort of physical interaction. They fall asleep beside each other, and in the mornings he catches himself pretending that the warmth is heavier, more solid, and has a nest of brown bed-head.

He ignores his mind and goes about his days, falling asleep with difficulty every night.

And then one night, something startles him out of his sleep, an unseen force slamming into his chest, driving the breath out of him. He struggles, tries to scream, and finally forces himself up, mind alert, helmet rushing to his head from the bedside table. He hears a soft crying, and it is not until Mystique presses against him, cradling him and whispering soothing sounds in his ear, that he realizes that it is only inside his head. He brushes her away and stumbles out of the room and down the stairs. He finds himself in the living room—one of them; Emma says that there are several, and this is only her family’s summer home—and he collapses onto the nearest chair. He clenches his eyes closed and waits.

Soon the noise returns: soft, muffled cries, as though even in his mind Charles is pressing his face into his forearm. Soon after the sound come the sights—flashes of a battle, one of the few Charles has seen since the day on the beach (and Erik steers away from those memories). Smoke mills about, there is the smell of (Erik could never forget it) burning flesh, and he sees, through Charles’ eyes, the children, scattered across the field, helping each other to their feet. The girls, the redhead and the dark-skinned pair, are helping Sean to his feet, his freckles standing out against skin made paler by the splashes of blood that decorate him. Erik’s heart clenches in his chest, as his own memories layer with Charles: finding Sean, seeing him train, that first fateful attempt at flight, the utter joy on his face as he swooped around and around the satellite—

He pulls away from the memories, back to the battlefield, wonders what happened, why Charles is there this time, until he sees it in the background: a hillock of well-groomed green grass gently sloping up towards the front of the grand mansion. Someone had attacked the _mansion_ , he realizes, and Charles’ thoughts echo in his head.

He is reliving the memory of the battle, and with every blow that lands on his students’ flesh, he feels Charles’ mind shake and tremble. With every slap, every hit, every lance of flame and spire of ice that collides with the flesh of the teenagers, he hears a whimper, the first ones soft and growing louder. They build and build until words break free.

 _Erik, Erik, Erik. If you—If I—You wouldn’t have let them do this. You wouldn’t have let anyone threaten us, our family, this place, and I… I can’t. Hank is overwhelmed, Alex is unconscious, Sean has a crater in his chest, and the younger ones are afraid to sleep. I can feel their minds now, restless, so full of terror. This was a safe haven. This was our safe haven, Erik, but without you it’s not ours and not even safe._

 _I miss you. I miss you, I miss you, and god, I don’t know how to stop._ A massive wave of loneliness looms over Erik, and then he feels wetness on his arm, splashing against his bare skin. It is hot and he knows that if he brought it to his lips, it would be salty. But as he shifts, his sleeves brushes against his skin and then he realizes that they are not his tears.

He holds vigil on the cold couch, waiting until the storm of tears fades and dries away, until the wracking sobs slow, and morning comes. Mystique finds him later, asleep, his hands pressed against the side of his helmet as though in the act of removing it.

\--

They are invading a mutant testing facility in Nevada—by all accounts far out of Charles’ range, according to Emma—when the unthinkable happens: Erik is blindsided by a stone weapon, a hunk of statue wielded by a crazed guard. People are screaming, he catches a glimpse of a camera and a stunned newscaster out of the corner of his eye, and then Azazel has him away from there.

He is only stunned, not truly injured, despite the bloody gash in his neck. It is nothing, and he presses a rag to it in the cool darkness of a spare bedroom of the house (so like Westchester, but never to be the same, not really). He feels Charles before he hears him, and he closes his eyes as a tempest of _worryfearangerdesperation_ presses against the confines of his skull, like the most welcome headache in the world. _Be safe. Be safe. Be safe. Be safe._

The message continues on as he drifts into a half-sleep, the beat tapping itself into his mind, evening out as his breath does, thrumming in time with his heart.

\--

The thoughts are peaceful for a while. The school (for that is how Charles sees it) is being rebuilt. New students come; most stay. A boy with icy hands, another with gorgeously soft white wings, the man from the bar who so effectively turned them both away…Charles thinks fond thoughts of them all, teaches them all, and still he worries.

And then it happens, the event that Erik had been dreading. Charles wakes from a nightmare that is set on an all-too-familiar beach.

He feels him struggle to wake, stirring beneath the heavy blankets of his ground-floor bedroom. He feels his consciousness break free of the dream state, feels his chest heave up and down as his heart tattoos a rapid beat against his ribs. He feels him move automatically, attempt to throw back the covers and swing his feet onto the floor, as one does to shake off the vestiges of a bad dream. But the movements halt as he tries again and again to violently yank the covers from his non-responsive legs, and as he tries to move he tangles himself and falls half on his face, leaving his sobs half-muffled and half-panted into the cool air of the room.

He feels Charles shove against the mattress, trying to turn himself onto his back, feels his fury at what he perceives as impotence, surely—

But no. It seems that even when Charles’ thoughts are in his head, he cannot read them quite right. Charles is not angry at his failure to leave his bed. Instead, his rage is directed at himself, and morphs like quicksilver into sorrow of a terrifying depth. _Raven_.

And then, softer, sadder, sweeter still, _Erik_.

There are flashes, then, of hot sand, an overexposed beach awash with too-hot sunlight, stripping away illusions and perceptions of happiness and equality. He sees himself from the back, the helmet gleaming in the sunlight, the damn woman, then, with her gun. She fires at him, impudent creature, and he remembers how he felt in that moment. He could do anything, counter any attack, mount any offense, destroy every human. Here was this girl, wielding the element that belonged to him, the metal that was in his blood and in his genes. He watched his hand sway, deflecting the bullets, and then, faster that his eye could follow, he felt it.

It pierced through Charles’ back, and pain as he had not felt since Schmidt’s torture escapades shot through his mind. It felt like a near-molten steel rod had replaced his spine.

And yet, in Charles’ mind, the pain was nothing.

It was strange, to look up and see his own face staring down, terrified, angered, careful. It was stranger still to feel the pulsing wave of _patience-kindness-friendship-brother-love_ that Charles emitted when confronted with that self-same visage. And when he said those words, those awful words, that sounded like a condemnation tolling in his ears, all that he felt from Charles—

 _it’s okay, it’s okay, love love love please listen please stay help me heal me keep me hold me_

 _don’t go love you please don’t—need you not me without you in you please Erik Erik ErikErikErik_

 _live in you with you breathe you hear you hold me stay here in your arms love your eyes your mouth your heart your mind stay stay please pain you love_

A litany, barely coherent, with a coursing undercurrent of pain and love and want and understanding, with a terrifyingly strong riptide of need that threatened to pull Erik under and drown him in Charles, and all he wants to do is let go and not even try to swim.

And then he sees Mystique’s face, but he can’t even think that name because of the force of Charles’ thoughts. _Raven, Raven, beautiful Raven, always beautiful blue pale dark tan human mutant friend sister family child hiding. Lovely. Strong. My family, only family, only blood, love you help me stay love help please love. Raven_

And when he stands, passes Charles off like some sort of toy that he has tired of (never, how could he?), he sees his back. He watches himself gesture, summoning mutants to his side. He cannot hear his own speech because of the blood rushing in Charles’ ears, and as Raven—Mystique—walks to him, and he summons Azazel to them, and they vanish, the world blurs.

Pain.

Beyond the bullet, beyond the camps, the only thing that Erik can find to compare lies in a small room in Germany with two men holding his mother as she slumps, the bullet buried in her flesh.

Loneliness. Distress. They have left him, left him to go and work against him, and he lies powerless to stop them, devoid of love and hope and family, all.

The beach fades in a wash of too-bright light, and then he is back with Charles, silken pillowcase soaked through with salty tears, slipping into his mouth and moistening his face as pale, futile fists grasp and release the sheets, clenching and unclenching in a terrifying display of powerless despair. He feels the need rise up in Charles, the compulsion to rise to his knees and scream his misery into the night, he feels the abdomen tensing as he prepares to rise, and then—nothing.

Instead, Charles and Erik both turn their faces to their pillows and sob, silent, until it fades to dark again.

\--

And when it is unexpected, at odd moments during the day or night, _be safe be safe be safe_.

\--The oddest thoughts bleed through.

 _They’re not alone_ , he catches Charles assuring himself more than once. _They have each other, and they’ve certainly found others like them by now. They understand—“mutant and proud,” after all. They have one another._

Erik feels a pang deep in his chest as he glances over to the bed. Mystique lies dormant in the moonlight, sheets pooling in white around her waist, her blue skin shimmering in the silver glow from the window. Her arm is curled out over the spot where he should, by all rights, be. He cannot bring himself to return to her.

 _He understands her better than I ever could. I should be grateful that he has her, because at least I know that she is safe from harm and away from judgment. And Erik…she knows him. He will let her in, in time. And then she can give him the comfort that he needs. And they will be…happy._

 _Perhaps that is for the best, after all,_ he continues, and Erik has never wanted to hit Charles quite as much as he does. Instead he grits his teeth and tangles his fingers and hunches over, eyes pressed shut.  
 _  
They may even no longer think of me. Soon I may be just a passing shared presence._

Erik laughs, a grim chuckle that does not contain a whit of humor.

 _If they stop caring, perhaps they will have a greater chance at happiness. And then I… Well, they can be content with who they are and what they are accomplishing, whatever and wherever that may be. And perhaps, one day, they can provide each other the family that they need. Especially Raven, who was always so alone. She loved me, yes, but…it wasn’t what she needed, not really. She can do better. She can find family in Erik._

Underneath his words, loneliness and an unnamed sensation tug at Erik’s mind. He focuses for a moment, sifting through the languages in his head to try to find a name to put to it, half-listening as Charles rationalizes, the imbecile. As if he could ever be forgotten.

 _And after all, she fights by his side. She is his comrade in arms. Erik could—will—learn to love her, because she is beautiful and strong and there_  
 _  
(and a whole person)_ hisses a loathsome dark corner of Charles’ mind, and Erik winces at the despair. Charles dredges himself out as quickly as he can, with _Yes, and Erik can become her real family, and Emma can teach her about being a woman and a mutant, and Angel can keep her company, and she could have a home that doesn’t always make her feel a need to compensate. It is for the best._

Erik finds the right word, and his heart twists. His eyes sting, and his hands clench, and he feels the same mood flood his mind. _Homesickness._

\--

It happens, now and again, even when he and his team have not been taking “violent vigilante action,” as the media have termed it. He will be poring over battle plans, building specifications, various locations of mutants, or even staring absently at a chessboard trying to pretend that Emma is Charles, when the thought slips in (he would say idly, if not for the immense press of need and want, if not for the sheer fervent pleading of it): _Please be safe. Be safe, my friend._

\--

He hears, one night over a quiet dinner, a sigh, followed by that familiar voice in his mind, _Perhaps it isn’t them._

Intrigued, he stands and leaves the room, ignoring the looks the team shoots him. He makes his way to the balcony, leans against the rail and watches the setting sun, and listens.  
 _  
It could be me. It might be me. I think it is me, in the end. After all, no one stays, not mother nor father nor sister nor lover. I am the common denominator, then; I am the one at fault._

Erik’s heart aches.

 _If I had just…perhaps better training, or more acceptance. I could’ve given Raven so much more kindness, I could’ve opened myself up to you, Erik, instead of insisting he open up to me. I was so selfish. I wasn’t…I am not able to be strong enough. Erik, you give your cause your all. Your strength and passion and hope and anger. I could not do that for you both. I could not give you my all, because I am…weak. If I were stronger…if I were better, more able to see clearly and lead truly…would you have stayed?_

\--

And again, the next night.

\--

And the night after that, a whisper. Erik, I would give my power to have you back.

Erik’s fingers curl around the metal edges, but he does no more.

\--

He realizes later, after a few months, that these thoughts come when Charles is at his lowest. When the mansion is dark and silent. When the training days have been hard. When the students are afraid or angry. When Charles is at his lowest and most desperate, he hears flashes—I could change for you, Erik. I would…I would let you change me. Please come back. Come home.

He leaves the helmet on because he cannot bear to corrupt the one innocent thing in his life. It is only this steadfast resolution that keeps the damned contraption on his head.

\--

He sits, night after night, sleepless, listening to the barrage of nightmares and half-real imaginings. He feels Charles tension, the way his shoulders are rigidly terse during the day and wound even tighter during the night. He sees his worst thoughts, his terrors and hopes and dreams for all of the children that he finds. He watches the renovation of the bunker (dubbed the “Danger Room”); sees the hidden passages hidden behind secret panels; notices the development of them all; watches Sean and Hank and Alex shift from students to teachers in their own right.

Above all, he feels the endless thrum of the prayer (and he can only describe it as such, the desperate prayer of a hopeless man who entrusts his thoughts to the very air with the despairing hope that someone who matters will listen) _be safe be safe be safe be safe._

And it is not a single event that breaks him, but rather the compilation of them all. They sit, heavy on his mind, pressing on the back of his neck like the oft-damned helmet. He watches his friend (his only friend, his best friend, his brother, his lover) change, gradually, can feel him bending and warping like metal under flaming pressure.

He is falling to pieces, and Erik knows this because the organized paradise of Charles’ mind has fallen into disrepair. His thoughts are covered in frantic sensation, emotion, disorderly and agitated. They dance like sparks and cinders above a fire that has outgrown its grate, and they burn the fringes of Erik’s mind. He wonders at the sensation, the familiarity of it, before it strikes him.

This is his mind those many, many months ago, as he reached out and grasped with suicidal desperation at the vanishing submarine. This is his mind when the strange shape plunged into the water, when those arms wrapped around his shoulders and saved him from drowning in the water of the ocean and the fire of his mind.

And now all he wants to do (needs to do, feels the necessity like a white-hot brand over his heart) is to take off the helmet, to extend his arms and wrap them around Charles’ shoulders and hold him close and never let him go. He wants to whisper to him _calm your mind_ when the night terrors strike, wants to tell him that he is not and never again will be alone, because he, Erik, is there, at his side, with him.

Emma laughs in the next room, low and wrong to his senses, and Azazel murmurs something in response.

He shakes his head and clenches his fist and pretends he is made of steel.

\--

It is June, sunny and beautiful. They are in lower California. Mystique romps around the large, airy rooms, Emma trailing and making scathing remarks, with Azazel eyeing the former with a slight leer that Erik knows he will have to watch carefully. The windows are open, and birds are singing, and the sky is azure blue, and it is the most cliché spring day Erik has ever seen. He is shaking his head and wondering where to go from here when he hears it.

 _I thought it was the worst day of my life, the day I had to watch you walk away._

A flash of _pain-hurt-love-stay-hope-break-loss—_

 _Now I almost find myself grateful._

Then _relief-safe-away-free-untroubled—_

 _This way I know that you won’t hurt when you hear._

Now _pain-sorrow-abandonment-alone so alone—_

 _You have moved on, my friend, and I thank the world for that. I could not bear to cause you pain._

And then silence.

It is a ringing silence, one that speaks volumes. Erik frowns and reaches back into his mind for the thm-thmp beat of be safe be safe be safe, near and dear as the thrumming of his heart, comforting in times of pain, and finally hears—

Nothing.

Charles is gone.

He clutches at his head and his team whirls towards him. He realizes belatedly that he has verbally cried out, but he ignores their shock and beckons Azazel. “Take me to Charles,” he gasps when he can get the breath. He stammers the address, and Mystique—Raven—completes it for him. They each grasp a bright red hand and then, in a puff of sulfur and red haze, he is there, on the sweeping green lawn before the looming mansion.

Even as they follow the path into the mansion, Erik cannot ward off the hated thought: _too-late-too-late-too-late-too-late._

 _Coward._

 _Imbecile._

 _All you had to do was take it off._

 _All you had to do—_

They burst in through the doors to find a roomful of people. It is a ground floor bedroom, immediately recognizable as Charles’. The people sit, stand, linger close against the walls. Their faces are pale and tightly drawn with sorrow and anger and fear. Nowhere does Erik see Charles. The thoughts comes louder: _too-late-too-late-too-late-too-late-coward—  
_  
“It _would_ be you.”

The voice is familiar, accompanied by an unfamiliar growl, and he turns to see Hank looming protectively over the small red-haired girl (Jean) and a small blonde boy with downy-soft white wings (Warren, he thinks).

He continues on. “What did you do to him? Where have you taken him?”

Erik begins, “No, I didn’t—“

“Fuck that,” snarls Alex from across the room. He is holding a smaller boy wearing a visor (Scott) and his face is contorted with rage. “How the hell could you turn on him like that?! He was your best friend, and bad enough that you left him bleeding and broken on a beach with no way to get home, you fucker, now you take him away from us?! We _need_ him! He _needs_ us! God so help me, if you don’t tell us—“

“Yes, _God so help you,_ ” Erik hisses, feeling his face warp in fury. “ _God so help you_ for running him into the ground, _God so help you_ for not even considering the stress and pressure he was under, _God so help you_ for not providing the man who you claim is so important even the smallest of outlets. _God so help you_ for forcing him to reach out to me with words he thought I couldn’t hear just so he would have someone to turn to. I did not take him from you now, but I will find him and _I will damn well take him from you then_.”

The room is full of echoing silence.

His thoughts throb. _Not too late not too late fix it find him hold him love him._

Before the assembled children, he lifts the helmet from his head. He drops it onto the empty bed, onto the pillow where he has felt Charles cry deep into the night. And he leaves as he came, sweeping out through the doors onto the terrace and then the path, down the wandering green slopes of neatly trimmed glass. He feels Azazel’s questioning eyes on his back, and he says, “Go back and fetch Emma. Meet me at the gate ahead. We are going to find Charles.”

His answer is a puff and the scent of sulfur on the breeze.

\--

A day later sees no results. Emma looks strained, but one suggestion of pausing—and twin violent glares from Erik and Mystique (Raven)—has them reboarding the chopper and taking off again. They fly over zone by zone, Emma focusing, trying to get a hint of Charles or a distinct lack of activity where some should be.

\--

Another day passes.

\--

And another.

\--

Soon, it has been two weeks and no luck. Emma is ragged around the edges, pieces of her flickering diamond and then reverting back to flesh intermittently. Her telepathy is going wild, and Erik can feel it for the first time, pushing at the edges of his mind like spikes, so unlike Charles.

Finally, he allows her to rest. They return to Virginia, and she collapses in her room. Raven begins pacing the ground floor living room, raging to Azazel, who takes it in stride. Riptide vents his pent-up energy in the garden, tearing up the turf and flowers and little pond.

Erik retreats to his room. He presses his hands to his face, starting when his fingers touch skin where there is normally metal, and his mouth twists in the facsimile of a smile. He closes his eyes, trying to calm his mind, to think where on earth Charles might have gone, desperately reaching out, waiting to feel the clash of his emotions against his helmet, but they don’t stop, they keep traveling, until—

 _Erik_

He gasps, reaching out, grasping for the thought as best he can. He gets vague sensations— _the press of restraints against thin white wrists, indistinct voices, presses of needles against shaking forearms. Mirrors around him, layered like the helmet. A door, a man with glinting glasses and a clipboard, looming.  
_  
A low brick building. Trimmed hedges. Suits. And then—

With a shout, he rises, beckons his team. He knows where Charles is.

\--

The building is low to the ground, no windows, brown brick. It emanates malice and wrongness. It is labeled as a research facility for the CIA.

Erik could scream in anger. Instead, he tears the walls out.

\--

He finds Charles two floors below the ground, in a secluded room paneled in mirrors and painting in white. He is strapped into a chair, now face-down, his waist, wrists, ankles, knees, individual fingers bound. Above him, a machine looms; a scientist holds a shaving razor, and another holds a wicked-looking instrument obviously designed to cut through bone.

He drives the drill-razor into the second man’s throat before he can even blink. He slices the first man’s throat with the razor, pressing the blade deep until it strikes bone.

Charles is insensate, trembling. No clear words emerge, and Erik cannot get a single thought from him, only vague sensations—fear pain cut slice examine drugs hurt hurt hurt save me kill me please now.

He gently turns the chair over, undoing the metal restraints even as he runs his hands through Charles’ hair, pressing his face against Charles’. He feels eyelashes brush against his high cheekbone, hair whisper against his brow. He moves upward and presses kisses against the forehead, smoothing out the creases borne from pain.  
 _  
Calm your mind, my friend. Calm your mind. You must calm your mind._

And slowly, Charles listens.

\--

It has been nearly a year since that night.

Days pass much as they did; he sits in his study and broods, running his finger along the metal edge of his helmet. Azazel and Emma recruit, and the house gains more inhabitants. Mystique discovered who was responsible for the facility and is very slowly building a massive revenge, but Erik is content with his violent, bloody, swift retribution. A girl with a strand of white comes to stay with them, as well as a small slimy boy who insists on going by the name Toad.

When the sun sets, and Azazel and Emma return, he has one more trip for the demon. He expects it by now, holding out a red hand and smiling a slight grin.

When they arrive, Jean is in the kitchen with a plate of cookies. She smiles and holds one out to Azazel, who accepts it with a grave thank you. She giggles and hugs him before he disappears, and then she grins brightly at Erik and rushes off somewhere else.

He smiles, softer than he is used to, and follows her into the corridor. He moves down the hallway, pressing against the wall as a gaggle of screaming children blusters past. He finds the door, gently makes his way in.

Charles is on a lounge, pouring over an open folder that is undoubtedly a scientific briefing from Hank. He looks up when Erik closes the door and smiles, wide and brighter than any sun Erik has ever seen. He drops the folder and opens his arms, and by then Erik is already by his side.

The helmet lies on the floor beside the door, forgotten and unimportant.

Two faces press together, breath washing against mouths, and their minds melt together.

 _Erik_ , thinks Charles. _You’re home._

 _Charles_ , thinks Erik. _I’ll never leave again._


End file.
